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WINE + iTunes 7

I am embarking on a new geeky mission, that’s an extension of an older mission that I completed, but not to the extent that I really wanted to.

Our electricity bills at home are outrageous, and I decided to start doing my part by consolidating and eliminating PCs that did not need to be running all the time. Every night, I turn off my main workstation PC, and only leave 2 on 24/7.

A few months ago, I had 2 servers, 1 Mac Mini, and two workstation PCs that were on at all times. Each one had its own purpose, and were compartmentalized so that services were not redundant between two machines. This became the first concern for me in trying to lower the electric bills for the household.

I moved the file server, development web server, and video processing to one new server, with very high specs that is able to handle the load. The music serving was then being done strictly from the Mac Mini, as it was the only Mac that had 250+gb of storage (through a mini mate).

Though the Mini doesn’t suck down as much power as the other PCs in the room, it is still on at all times for in-demand audio playback from one of the three Mac laptops we have laying around the house.

In my attempt to further consolidate things, I’ve installed iTunes 7 on the main server through WINE (1.1.4), and it seems to be working just fine. Though this would be an experimental fix at first, I think that it will work out just fine in the future.

The only thing left to do is export all of my music to the main server, restore all of the album artwork, and setup the podcasts that I listen to through that install of iTunes. The main issue I see here is whether or not I will be able to use iTunes to manage my iPod. Now, that’s not that big of a deal, as there are many other ways under Linux to manage an iPod, and I might have to go down one of those routes anyway.

Though consolidating all services to two servers hasn’t really made much of a dent in the electricity bill, I can sleep better at night knowing that I’m not the sole cause of the carbon emissions that are a direct result of our electricity use.